If your top manager resigned at on a Tuesday, how many of your senior staff would have their CVs updated and their LinkedIn status set to “open to work” before the office coffee had even gone cold?
It is the question that keeps HR directors awake in the small, silent hours of , yet it is the one question they never seem to ask during the bright, fluorescent hours of the quarterly skip-level interview. We look at retention data as if it were weather-a series of atmospheric pressures and temperature shifts that result in a predictable percentage of “churn.”
We see a 5% attrition rate and congratulate ourselves on a stable climate. But retention data is a blunt instrument that measures the average and misses the architecture. It treats every person as a discrete unit of labor, ignoring the fact that teams are often held together not by corporate loyalty or the quality of the dental plan, but by a single, load-bearing human being.
The Four Pillars of Thomas
Thomas, a Director of Tax at a multinational firm I worked with recently, sat in his glass-walled office and conducted what he thought was a standard pulse check. He met with four seniors: